The River Wife (10 page)

‘ “If we do not return . . . ” said the other.

‘ “We will. We will always be together.”

‘Closer and closer they were carried and the sea was dark and then lighter until they were between sand and golden sky, carried in a fold of green. Faster and faster they were carried as the sea pulled up and back and began to fall towards the silver sand.

‘ “Leap!” said the friend. “Leap to the light!”

‘And so they both leapt, higher than they had ever leapt before, and the swirl and tumble of water crashed beneath and they arced their silver bodies up, up, up. Each was transfixed by the shining brightness, the searing pain of beauty that captivated each until their bodies fell and hit the hard crust of wet sand, and there they stopped. Each of them was too far from the other to know that they were not, in fact, far at all. In vain they sucked at the golden light that, now there was time to really look, had about it a distant vivid blueness that might have been the sea after all. And there they lay stilled by the light and shivered alone.

‘And then, as one fish watched with its mother-of-pearl eye blind with the golden glare, it felt a soft warmth and the sensation of being gently held and lifted. It glimpsed the fleeting shadow of an enormous creature before the water enveloped it and the breath of life returned.

‘But though the fish waited beyond the tumbling waves for the friend to be returned to the sea also, the friend did not come. The tide changed and changed again. Darkness came and the golden light returned and still the other waited and knew it was too long, and in time the fish returned to the deeper sea.

‘ “I have seen the golden world. I have lain upon the shore. And upon the shore it is not possible to breathe and so it was as if I had died. But there are creatures on the shore who watch over us. And some of us they return to life, and some they keep with them,” said the fish when it was asked.

‘ “How do they choose?” a fish asked.

‘ “I do not know,” said the other.

‘And the fish was glad in the time that remained to live in the green ocean and be not dazzled by things unknown. When another asked to swim beside the fish and hear the story again, the fish said, though it caused more pain than to breathe upon the shore, that it preferred to swim alone.

‘And so it is,’ said Wilson James, smiling now at me, and himself again, ‘that fish leap still to the shore to bathe in the golden light, and fall and wait on the silver sand. And rarely, though not unknown, a hand reaches down and carries the fish to the water and watches as it takes flight back into the sea.’

I said to Wilson James, ‘Was it the one who wanted to leap who was saved, or the one who did not?’

‘Perhaps it is the one who led, perhaps the one who followed. It depends on how you listen,’ he said.

‘That is the secret,’ I said, ‘to every story. It is always in the listening.’

‘I never told Eustace,’ said Wilson James, ‘that when I was a boy I found a man washed up on the beach. I was always happy whenever I walked on a beach not to find such a thing again. In the last few months of Eustace’s life his mother and I took a house right on the coast where he could hear the waves at night. It had been years since we had lived together, but having to be with one another and be kind because of him, somehow we managed it. It changed the perspective on everything. When he died it all fell apart, but while he was alive, we were somehow better than ourselves.’

After a while he said, ‘I should have had more children. I thought when I married again . . . It is a strange thing to choose a mother for your children.’

Wilson James washed jars and lined them up on the table. He stirred the jam and tested it on a plate to see if when it cooled it ran this way or that or stayed quite still. ‘Jam is tricky because you never know how your mood will affect it. If you are sad it always goes runny and will not set.’

I said, ‘Are you often sad?’

‘Do you have no simple questions?’ he asked, but he was not unhappy. ‘I do what men do. Instead of being sad I grow angry and arrogant. But lately, since Eustace . . . It’s helped being here.

I don’t know what you are—a muse, a ghost, a spirit. If it’s madness that I can see you and even touch you then I feel perhaps at last I am understanding what it is to be a writer. In the back of my mind I wonder when I will know that the madness has gone far enough. That it’s time to return.’

‘On some days you do not feel the sun on your face at all but stay here in the house. You smell sometimes as if something harsh has possessed you. What is that?’

He looked out the window. ‘That is caused by a bottle. But I think I’m coming out of that.’

Wilson James took a clean plate and poured jam onto it and breathed on it. He reached out and lifted my hand towards him. Dipping his finger into the red sauce he drew on my skin first one long straight line and then another shorter line crossing through it. He said, ‘I believed in the idea of heaven when I was a boy. I thought this was the sign that meant that I was safe. By the time I became a man I knew it wasn’t true. I turned away from believing in anything. I thought there was more assurance in no reassurance. But here, in the forest, I want a symbol. I want something that makes me feel safe again.’

I took the plate and dipped my finger and turned his arm over. I drew first one flowing red line and then beside it another flowing from the skin inside his elbow to his wrist, two lines that were not hard but soft and moved as the river moves into the palm of his hand. The mark of a river wife. I felt the warmth of him beneath his shirt and I wanted to rest my hand against his chest and feel the beat of his heart. I wanted to tell Wilson James that when a new bird flew down into the forest, sat upon a branch and watched me, that my heart leapt to think it was my daughter returned. That the knock I thought I heard at the door, the sound of the silence bringing snow, the white flash of a creature in the forest, that all these moments I imagined her come home again, though always as the child she had been.

I had no picture of her grown and I imagined her in countless ways.

I said, ‘They are never far from us, the ones we lose.’

‘No, you are wrong,’ he said, drawing me to him. ‘They are so far and I am still walking and he does not get any closer.’

‘I have no life beyond the river,’ I said suddenly, and wondered at my courage.

‘You mean you are afraid?’

‘No, I can never leave here.’

He held my face and kissed me. His body was like a cave I wanted to curl up in, his mouth a pool where I could taste sunlight.

‘I want to make love to you.’

‘It won’t help,’ I said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘We cannot.’

I
lingered in rain as it settled on my arms and nose, and licked the mist from my fingertips. I ran my fingers over bark. I touched the hairs of unfurling ferns and the skin of new leaves. I rested my cheek on vivid moss. I thought of how Wilson James had looked before he kissed me. I thought of how the lines that marked his forehead were deeper than any other lines on his face, and when we laughed together it was as if we were young and saplings.

‘What is unseen has always been the greatest challenge to humans,’ my father said, and I understood him as I never had before. Wilson James had drawn a thread across my skin and it pulled me towards him. I resisted.

As a fish I did not think about skin and touch. I was a creature of watchfulness. I was absorbed by movement. I sought food. I sought shelter. To live in water is to understand submission. As a woman I was consumed by the need to touch. I felt the rush of yearning, the flow of desire, but I would not submit to it.

After some days his face receded. I stayed upstream and focused again on ripples and whorls caught in water, and the weaving and folding of stories before the river flowed on, carrying with it the alchemy of told and untold things. The moon filled and emptied and Wilson James did not rise up except when I chose to think of him. Then I found myself quite still, as if listening, but instead I was watching the pictures I had gathered of him.

I had not tested the visibility I had with Wilson James upon another human. But I had to know if others might see me too. If others could reach out and find my skin. Had the years of living with none for company called up in me the capacity to slip beyond my domain and enter at last the world of humans? Is this what my loneliness had made? A pathway to others who were like me?

I darted and tumbled through rapid and rock fall, over waterfall and through crevasse, until I was carried into the greatest lake. The mountains were fired by dawn. I swam across the lake and slipped into a quiet finger of river. There I stepped from the water and took my woman form and waited to test this Wilson James effect. I smiled for he would like to think that his name had another purpose.
The James effect
—to see people from the world just beyond the reach of human sight.

The heat of the day had passed before a man came through the trees and stepped onto the riverbank. His face was shaded by the brim of his hat. As he stood in the water he made small hissing noises through his teeth. Sometimes he mimicked the songs of birds in answer to their calls in the forest beyond.

Dragonflies came and inspected his fly trick that skimmed across the water’s surface. The man adjusted his rod and waited. The silt in the water stirred at his feet and settled back to the river bottom. He went quietly downstream into the deep ponds, clambering over unseen rocks in the river. Again the feather darted across the water. I saw two trout turn and move upstream, leaving a small circle on the river’s dark skin.

Leaves gathered and moved slowly downstream. Between the grasses on the river’s edge spiders spun their webs. A frog sounded and then another, reciting their small poems over and over again. Insects hopped right into the river and were eaten before they were wet. The man caught his web in the leaves of a tree and pulled for its return. I stepped from behind a tree and he did not glance at me. I moved closer to him along the riverbank and still he did not appear to notice me. I stepped into the river and I remained invisible to him.

His hat was the colour of trees that grow tall in the snow. He could sense a fish close to his legs but the day was too warm and the fish was not interested in him. I said to him, ‘A river wife knows every fish and no fish would be caught while she is watching.’ The man heard nothing. But I knew I must make a final test and this was more difficult. I placed my hand on the man’s arm. He did not even remark it as a thread of hair or a passing fly.

In the shallow light of the water I looked at the face that looked back at me. My face had not aged as my father’s had. The dress I had cast as I stepped from the water that morning was the yellow green of summer grass with a tiny leaf pattern on it. My hair was as dark as water in shadow.

I stood beside the man and saw fish were feeding on a wash of dead flies that had drowned in the rapids upriver. Birds were singing coming- home songs. I watched the man spin his web and it made patterns in the sky one more time before I slipped back upstream to where the river rushed and tumbled. Only Wilson James could see me and touch me and hear me, and I could touch him. The mystery of it deepened. And I was happy thinking that somehow Wilson James had come through for me.